Convenors: Joanna Maciulewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), Anna Paluchowska-Messing (Jagiellonian University in Kraków) and Jakub Lipski (Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz)

How and why would Gulliver travel to 21st-century Poland? Why did British authors appropriate Spanish narrative models without acknowledging their debt? What prefatory material would have been necessary to introduce Frances Burney’s Evelina to an eighteenth-century Hungarian audience?

These questions prompt enquiries into the international currency of eighteenth-century British literature both then and now. They also point to the stimulative potential of bringing different cultures into contact across time. New explorations in the field of world literature and in adaptation studies have certainly demonstrated the generative impact of such exchanges. Building on this scholarship, we would like to investigate the ways in which texts of literature and culture evolved during the long eighteenth century as a result of cross-cultural fertilisations. Also, can an eighteenth-century literary text still trigger such evolutions now?

We seek proposals for contributions which explore cross-cultural literary transmission during the long eighteenth century. We also invite proposals which investigate modern non-Anglophone adaptations and appropriations of eighteenth-century British literature. The areas for analysis might include but are not limited to:

• imperatives and agendas behind cross-cultural literary translations, adaptations and appropriations;
• cross-cultural literary transmissions as a barometer of changing values and tastes;
• works of 18th-century British literature acquiring the status of universal archetypes through the processes of cross-cultural re-visions and re-mediations;
• works of 18th-century British literature bolstering the claims of modern publications, productions, or performances across cultures.